The Broken God

‘Danlo, we require your blood!’ the Beast growled out again.

To live, I die, he thought, silently repeating the Devaki prayer of initiation.

Ever since he could remember, ever since he had seen the older men naked and looked between their legs with dread and wonder, he had known this moment must come. The Beast reached down and grasped his membrum. Its claws were cold and sharp against the shaft. In his fear and cold, his unprotected stones tightened up in their sac. He was very afraid; never had he known such a belly-tightening fear, not even when Haidar fell sick from the slow evil and began bleeding from his ears. The fear was all over him, like dead cold air falling down from the sky, suffocating him, clutching in his lungs. He was afraid the Beast would cut him, yes, afraid of the pain, but even more he dreaded convulsing like a frightened snow hare and trying to run away. And if he did that, he would be slain. The Beast would kill him for giving in to his fear. This thought, in turn, fed his fear, intensified it until the sweat poured off his ribs and soaked the furs beneath him. The wind began to blow, chilling him to the core, and he despaired because he felt himself falling through a black bottomless night from which there is no escape. Fear is the consciousness of the child – he remembered Haidar saying this once when they were lost out at sea. He stared up at the brilliant stars, waiting for the Beast to cut him, or tear open his throat, and in a moment of exhilaration he realized that he was here to surrender up his fear, or rather, to lose a part of himself, to let die his childish conception of himself as a separate being terrified of the world. All men must be tested this way, he knew, or else they could never become full men. Just then the Beast roared something into the night, a huge, angry sound that rattled the skulls surrounding him. He felt his foreskin being pulled away from the bulb of his membrum, and there was a tearing, hot pain. He clenched his jaws so hard he thought his teeth would break off in splinters and be driven into his gums; his muscles strained to rip apart his bones, and instantly, his eyes were burning so badly he could not see. He could still hear, though, and in many ways that was the worst of it, the crunching, ripping sound of his foreskin being torn away from his membrum. It hurts! he silently screamed. Oh, God, it hurts! The pain was a red flame burning up his membrum into his belly and spine. The pain ate him alive; the world was nothing but fire and pain. There came a moment when his body was like a single nerve connected to a vastly greater ganglia and webwork of living things: trees and stars and the wolves howling in the valleys below. He could hear the death scream of churo and yaga, and all the animals he had ever killed exploding from his own throat; he remembered the story of a Patwin boy who had died during his passage, and he felt a sudden pressure below his ribs, as if a spear or claw had pierced his liver. In one blinding moment, he saw again the faces of each member of his tribe as they prayed to be freed of the slow evil. The hurt of all these peoples and things, and everything, flowed into him like a river of molten stone. He ached to move, to scream, to pull himself up and run away. Only now, wholly consumed by the terrible pain that is the awareness of life, he was no longer afraid. Beyond pain, there was only death. Death was the left hand of life, and suddenly he beheld its long, cold fingers and deep lines with a clarity of vision that astonished him. Seen from one perspective, death was cruel and dreadful like a murderer’s hand held over a baby’s face; but from another, death was as familiar and non-frightening as the whorls of his father’s open palm. He would die, tonight or ten thousand nights hence – he could almost see the moment when the light would flee his eyes and join all the other lights in the sky. Even now, as the Beast tore at him, he was dying, but strangely he had never been so alive. He held himself quiet and still, listening to the wind beating through the trees and over the mountains. He heard a voice whispering that his membrum’s red bulb must be exposed to the cold air, just as the man within must finally shed his childlike skin of wishes and certitude and come to know the world as it really is. That was the way of all life, he heard the voice say. Life was always lived with death close at hand, and it was continually shedding death even as it made itself over to be born anew.

To live, I die, he told himself.

And inside him, despite the pain, at the centre of his deepest self was just sheer joy at being alive. In some sense, he would always be alive, no matter the killing coldness of the wind or fatal illnesses or any of a thousand other fates that he might suffer.

‘Danlo!’ the Beast howled out. ‘Your blood is red and flows like a man’s!’

Danlo listened to his deep breathing as other cuts were carved into his flesh, tiny cuts up and down the length of his membrum. He realized that it was Soli making these cuts and rubbing various coloured powders into them. The cuts would fester and then heal, and soon his membrum would be like that of any other Alaloi man: long and thick, and decorated with dozens of green and ochre scars.

‘Danlo, are you ready now?’

He felt something soft being wrapped around his membrum; it felt like feather moss held in place with a newl skin.

‘Danlo, you must gather your strength for the journey,’ a voice called out of the darkness. Then the Beast stood above him, gripping a gobbet of flesh between its bloody claws. ‘This piece of meat will sustain you. Open your mouth and swallow it without chewing.’

Danlo did as he was told. Like a baby bird, he opened his mouth and waited. Suddenly, he felt the raw bit of meat pressed into his mouth, back against his tongue. He swallowed once, convulsively, and he tasted fresh warm blood.

‘Danlo, this is the skin of your childhood. It will impregnate you like a seed. From the child grows the man. Are you ready to be a man, now?’

Again Danlo swallowed against the hot salty slickness of his own blood.

‘Danlo, wi Ieldra sena! Ti ur-alashareth. The ancestors are coming! It is time for you to go over now.’

His eyes were now calm and clear, and he looked up at the stars to see a million points of light streaming toward him.

‘Danlo, you may turn your head.’

Danlo blinked his eyes slowly. He turned and there was Soli standing over him. He was dressed as usual, in his winter furs; the terrible Beast was gone. ‘You have done well,’ he said.

He helped Danlo sit up and wrapped him in a fresh shagshay skin. There was blood everywhere, dark red soaking into the white furs. Danlo looked through the flickering red fires up at the circle of skulls. He must find the one animal who was his doffel. Soli would help him if his vision faltered, but it would be better if he came to his other-self unaided and alone.

‘Danlo, can you see?’

‘Yes.’

He was six thousand feet above men and time. He turned his head in a half-circle, and he could see many things. Below him were the dark forest and the starlit hills of his childhood, and farther out where the island’s ragged shore came up against the ocean, he beheld the faint, silvery shimmer of sea ice falling off to infinity. There were nearer sights. Soli’s face was drawn out ghastly and pale; he looked at once fey and ill, as if he were ready to die. Pain is the awareness of life, Danlo thought. His body still burned with pain, but his spirit had begun the journey through pain into a deeper world. He was beginning to see himself as he really was. Every act of his passage had been designed to bring him to this moment. His childish picture of himself, his old ways of thinking – shattered, like ice crystals beneath a hammer stone. There was a sudden clarity, an intensity of colour, shape, and meaning. Far above him, in the sky, the stars burned with a pale blue fire, and nearer, spread over his thighs and belly, was his deep red blood. Again, he looked up at the circle of skulls, at the bits of ivory gleaming in the blackness. Each skull was his skull; life was connected to life in ways he was just beginning to see. One skull, though, seemed to shimmer under the watchful eyes of the Old Ones. One skull called out to him. It was the skull of Ahira, the snowy owl. Ahira, the wisest and wildest of the animals. No other animal was so alive and free. And no other animal was so perilous to one’s spirit. In truth, he dreaded discovering that Ahira was his doffel, his other-self, for only once in ten generations was one born whose other-self is Ahira. He stared on and on waiting for this splendid bird to stop calling him, but at last he was sure that Ahira was his doffel. Ahira must guide him and help him go over to the trackless, unknown world where his deepest self lived.

Soli saw Danlo gazing at Ahira’s small, round skull. That the Devaki fathers had acquired a skull at all was something of a miracle, for Ahira was the rarest of all birds and hunters did not often catch sight of him.

‘This bird?’ Soli said. ‘Are you sure, Danlo?’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Ahira, the snowy owl.’

‘Full men know this bird as the white thallow. You should call him that, too.’

Everyone knew, of course, that owls were thallows, just as they knew that God was a great thallow whose body made up the universe. But among the Alaloi elders, from tribe to tribe, there was a dispute as to whether God was a silver thallow, or the blue thallow, or the rare white thallow whom children referred to as the snowy owl.

‘Ahira is my doffel,’ Danlo said.

‘Very well,’ Soli said. Then he magically produced a musty leather bag stuffed with various objects. He rummaged around in the bag and removed a single, white feather. He gave it to Danlo, placing it between his folded hands. ‘This is the wing feather of the white thallow,’ he said. ‘The white thallow is your doffel.’

Danlo looked down at the feather. Its whiteness was as pure as snow. Along its edge it was rough and fuzzy, the better to muffle the sound of Ahira’s beating wings. Ahira was a magnificent hunter, and he could swoop down toward his prey in almost total silence. With a little bone clip that Soli gave him, Danlo fastened the feather to his long hair. Soli began to chant, then, and a world whose snowfields were pure and vast opened before him. Danlo entered into the dreamtime, into the altjiranga mitjina of his people. The shock of pain and terror (and his newfound ability to overcome his attachment to terror) had hurled him into this world. He listened to Soli chant, listened as the Old Ones began to speak to him. New knowledge was revealed to him, secrets that only a man may know. Soli chanted the lines of the Song of Life. The Song was a new way of structuring reality, a system of symbol and meaning connecting all things of the world to the great circle of halla. There are four thousand and ninety-six lines to this song; Soli chanted quickly, his deep voice rasping out the music. He told of how the lesser god, Kweitkel, had created the world from single pieces of rock and ice. He told of Kweitkel’s wedding with Devaki, and of their children, Yelena, Reina and Manwe. Danlo learned that on the third morning of the world, wise Ahira had befriended Manwe and taught him to love flying, hunting, and mating, and the other things of life. Manwe and Ahira – the Two Friends, two of the oldest of the Old Ones. Danlo listened to the Song of Life, and he joined them in the dreamtime. The dreamtime was now, the shall-be and always-was. The dreamtime occurred in the Now-moment, the true time in which the world was forever created anew.

‘Ali wos Ayeye,’ Soli chanted. ‘God is a great, silver thallow whose wings touch at the far ends of the universe.’

Danlo listened to the Song of Life’s sixty-fourth line. Now, and over the next three days, he must learn every line exactly as Soli chanted it because someday he would repeat the Song to a son or near-son of his own. Pain was the most potent of mnemonics; pain had awakened him to record the rise and fall and each liquid vowel; pain, and the intensity of pain, had prepared his mind and spirit to remember perfectly.

‘All animals remember …’ Soli sang out, and his voice began to tremble and crack. ‘All animals remember the first morning of the world.’ He stopped suddenly, rubbing the back of his neck. His face had fallen as grey as old seal grease. He licked his lips and continued with difficulty. After a while, he came to the first of the Twelve Riddles, chanting: ‘How do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit?’

Danlo waited for Soli to supply the answer in the second line of the couplet, but Soli could not speak. He groaned and clutched at his stomach and looked at Danlo.

‘Sir, what is wrong?’ Danlo asked. He didn’t want to speak because he sensed that the uttering of words would remove him from the dreamtime. But Soli suddenly heaved over gasping for breath, and he had to find out what was wrong. Now that he knew the way, he could make the journey into the dreamtime whenever he must. ‘Sir, here, let me loosen your hood’s drawstring – it is too tight.’

It was obvious that Soli was gravely ill. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his nose was bleeding. His eyes were the eyes of a whale caught unexpectedly in the freezing ice of the sea. Danlo stood up, and the rush of blood into his cut membrum was agony. He helped Soli lie down on the bloody platform where he had so recently surrendered up his childhood flesh. The Alaloi are not an ironic people, but he appreciated the deep irony of their reversed positions.

‘Sir, are you all right?’

‘No,’ Soli gasped, ‘never … again.’ He regained his wind, and spoke slowly. ‘Listen, Danlo, you must know. At a boy’s passage, one of the men must be the Beast. The Beast … the mask.’

With difficulty he bent over and stuck his hand into the leather bag. He removed a mask made of glued-together bones, fur, teeth and feathers. He rattled the mask in front of Danlo.

‘But it is sometimes hard to become the Beast,’ Soli said. ‘If the boy moves or cries out … then he must be slain. It is hard to become the Beast by wearing the mask alone. Help is needed. For some men, help. On the afternoon before the boy’s passage, the liver of the jewfish must be eaten. The liver gives terrible vision, terrible power. But it is dangerous, to eat it. Sometimes the power is too great. It consumes.’

Danlo took Soli’s hand; even though he himself was cold and half-naked, with only a shagshay skin draped loosely across his shoulders, Soli’s hand felt colder still. ‘What can I do? Is there no cure? Should I make some blood-tea to give you strength?’

‘No, that would not help.’

‘Does it hurt? Oh, sir, what can I do?’

‘I … believe,’ Soli said, ‘I believe that Haidar knew of a cure, but he has gone over, hasn’t he? All the men – the women, too.’

Danlo blinked away the pain in his eyes, and he found that he could see things very clearly. And on Soli’s face, in his tired, anguished eyes, there was only death. Soli would go over soon, he knew, there could be no help for that. It was shaida for a man to die too soon, but Soli’s death would not be shaida because it was clear that he was dying at the right time.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘ti-alasharia, you too, why, why?’

‘Yes,’ Soli said. And then he stretched out his hand and pointed upwards. ‘The stars, you must be told about the stars.’

Danlo looked up through the bitterly cold air at the heavens. He pulled the shagshay fur tightly around himself, let out a long steamy breath, and said, ‘The stars are eyes of the Old Ones. Even a child knows that.’

‘No, the stars are … something other.’

‘Does the Song of Life tell of the stars?’

Soli coughed deeply a few times; it seemed that he might begin gasping again. ‘Yes, the Song of Life, but that is only one song, the song of our people. There are other songs. The stars shine with eyelight, yes, but that is just a metaphor. A symbol, like the symbols for numbers we used to draw in the snow. There is an otherness about the stars that I … I must tell you.’

‘Please, sir.’

‘This will be hard to explain.’

‘Please.’

Soli sighed, then said, ‘Each star is like Sawel, the sun. A burning, a fusion of hydrogen into light. Five hundred billion fusion fires in this galaxy alone. And the galaxies … so many. Who could have dreamed the universe would make so many?’

Danlo pressed his knuckles against his forehead. He felt sick inside, dizzy and disoriented. Once, when he was eight years old, he and Haidar had been caught out on the sea in a morateth. The sky had closed in, white and low over the endless whiteness of the ice. After ten days, he hadn’t been able to distinguish right from left, up from down. Now he felt lost again, as if a morateth of the spirit were crushing him under.

‘I do not understand.’

‘The stars are like fires burning across space. Across the black, frozen sea. Men can cross from star to star in boats called lightships. Such men – and women – are called pilots. Your father was a pilot, Danlo.’

‘My father? My blood father? What was his name?’ He took Soli’s hand and whispered, ‘Who is my blessed father?’

But Soli didn’t seem to hear him. He began to speak of things that Danlo couldn’t comprehend. He told of the galaxy’s many wonders, of the great black hole at the core, and of that brilliant, doomed region of the galaxy called the Vild. Human beings, he explained, had learned to make stars explode into supernovae; even as they spoke together, beneath the dying sky, ten thousand spheres of light were expanding outward to the ends of the universe. ‘So many stars,’ Soli said, ‘so much light.’

Danlo, of course, couldn’t comprehend that this wild starlight would eventually reach his world and kill all of the plants and animals on Icefall’s surface. He knew only that Soli was dying, and seeing visions of impossible things.

‘Sir, who is my father?’ he repeated.

But now Soli had lapsed into a private, final vision, and his words made no sense at all. ‘The rings,’ Soli forced out. ‘The rings. Of light. The rings of eternity, and I … I, oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!’

Quite possibly he was trying to tell Danlo that he was his grandfather, but he failed, and soon his lips fell blue and silent, and he would never utter any words again.

‘Soli, Soli!’

Again, Soli began gasping for air, and very soon he stopped breathing altogether. He lay still with his eyes fixed on the stars. Danlo was surprised at how quickly he had died.

‘Soli, mi alasharia la shantih Devaki.’

How many times, Danlo wondered, had he said that prayer? How many times must he say it again?

He closed Soli’s eyes and kissed them. ‘Shantih, Soli, may your spirit find the way to the other side.’

Then the enormity of all that had occurred during the past days overwhelmed him. He jumped up and threw off his fur, standing naked to the world. ‘No!’ he cried out. ‘No!’ But there was no one to listen to him. The fires had burnt low, dim orange glimmerings lost into the blackness of night. It was very cold. He watched the fires die, and he began to shiver violently. ‘No,’ he whispered, and the wind stole the breath from his lips and swept it away. His body hurt so urgently that he welcomed numbness, but next to the pain of his spirit, it was almost nothing. How would he live now, he wondered, what would he do? He had been cut, and part of him had died, and so he was no longer of the onabara, the once-born children. But until he completed his passage, he would remain unfinished, like a spearpoint without an edge; he would never be of the diabara, the twice-born men. And because he knew that only a twice-born man who had learned the whole Song of Life could be wholly alive, he almost despaired.

Later that night, above the cave, he buried Soli with the others. After he had hefted the last frozen boulder onto his grave, he prayed. ‘Soli, pela ur-padda, mi alasharia, shantih.’ He pressed his eyes hard before shaking his head and crying out, ‘Oh, Ahira, what shall I do?’

He fell into the dreamtime, then, and the wind through the trees answered him. There was a rush of air carrying the deep-throated hooing of the snowy owl. It was Ahira, his other-self. Perched high on a yu tree’s silvery branch, across the snow-covered graveyard, Ahira was looking through the darkness for him.

‘Ahira, Ahira.’

The owl’s snowy round head turned toward him. His eyes were orange and black, wild and infinitely wise.

‘Danlo, Danlo.’ The owl turned his head again, and there was a shimmer of starlight off his eyes. And Danlo suddenly beheld a part of the circle of halla: the World-soul did not intend for him to join the Patwin tribe, nor any other tribe of the islands to the west. Who was he to bear the taint of shaida to his uncles and cousins? No, he would not burden his people with such unspeakable sorrows. No matter how badly he needed to hear the whole Song of Life, his future and his fate did not lie in that direction.

I must journey east, he thought. I must go to the Unreal City alone.

Somehow he must make the impossible journey to the city called Neverness. And someday, to the stars. If the stars really were fusion fires burning in the night, they were part of a vast, larger world that must know halla, too.

To Ahira, he solemnly bowed his head. ‘Mi alasharetha,’ Danlo said, praying for that part of himself that had died. ‘Shantih.’

Then he turned his back to the wind and wept for a long time.

CHAPTER TWO

Danlo the Wild

The organism is a theory of its environment.

– Walter Wiener, Holocaust Century Ecologist

It took Danlo nine days to prepare for his journey. Five days he spent in his snowhut, recovering from his cutting. He begrudged every day of it because he knew that the sledding across the eastern ice would be dangerous and long. According to Soli’s stories, the Unreal City lay at least forty days away – perhaps more. Since it was already 82nd day in deep winter, he couldn’t hope to reach the City until the middle of midwinter spring. And midwinter spring was the worst season for travel. Who could say when a fierce sarsara, the Serpent’s Breath, would blow in from the north, heralding many days of blizzard? If the storms delayed his crossing too long, he might be stranded far out on the Starnbergersee when false winter’s hot sun came out and melted the sea ice. And then he and his dogs would die. No, he thought, he must find the City long before then.

And so, when he deemed himself healed, he went out to hunt shagshay. Skiing through the valleys below Kweitkel was now very painful, since every push and glide caused his membrum to chafe against the inside of his trousers. Pissing could be an agony. The air stung the exposed red tip of his membrum whenever he paused to empty himself. Even so he hunted diligently and often because he needed a lot of meat. (Ice fishing through a hole in the stream’s ice would have been an easier source of food, but he found that the fatfish were not running that year.) He cut the meat and scant blubber into rations; he sealed the rich blood into waterproof skins; he entered the cave and raided the winter barrels of baldo nuts. Into his sled went carefully measured packets of food. Into his sled, he carefully stowed his oilstone, sleeping furs, bag of flints, and bear spear. And, of course, his long, barbed whalebone harpoon. The dogs could pull only so much weight. Somewhere to the east they would finish the last of the food, and he would use the harpoon to hunt seals.

On the morning of his departure he faced the first of many hard decisions: what to do with the dogs? He would need only seven dogs to pull the sled: Bodi, Luyu, Kono, Siegfried, Noe, Atal, and his best friend, Jiro. The others, the dogs of Wicent and Jaywe, and the other families of the tribe, he would have to let loose. Or kill. After he had loaded his sled, he paused to look at the dogs staked out near their snow dens at the front of the cave. There were fifty-nine of them, and they were watching him with their pale blue eyes, wagging their tales and whining. In truth, he knew it was his duty to kill them, for how would they live without men to get their food and comfort them when they were sick or lonely? The dogs would flee barking into the forest, and they would pack and try to hunt. The wolves, however, were better hunters than the dogs; the silent wolves would track and circle them, and they would kill the dogs one by one. Or they would die of hunger, with folds of flesh hanging loosely over their bones. The dogs would surely die, but who was he to kill them? He thought it would be better for them to know a single additional day of life, even if that day were filled with pain and terror. He looked over the treetops into the sky. It was sharda, a deep, deep blue. The deep sky, the green and white hills, the smells of life – even a dog could love the world and experience something like joy. Joy is the right hand of terror, he told himself, and he knew he wouldn’t steal the dogs away from life. He nodded his head decisively. He smiled and trudged up through the powdery snow to set them free.